Optical Mouse Used As Cheap Motion Sensor

drphil writes " Dr. Tuck Wah Ng, a member of the Faculty of Engineering at the National University of Singapore uses an optical mouse as a cheap non-contact motion sensor in his research. If a resolution of a little less than 60 microns is sufficient, you really can't beat the price. Dr. Ng has studied the viscoelastic deformation of plastics using a hacked optical mouse - published in J. Chem. Ed. vol 81, p 1628, 2004. You'd need to be a subscriber of the journal to see anything but the abstract, but any university science/chemistry library would have a copy of this issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. (Viscoelastic deformation, in plain English, is the degree to which a plastic stretches when you pull on it)"

Comments

$10 Thermal Imager from a porch light

[N8F8]

I was looking for an inexpensive option for thermal imaging and I came across this project for a $10 thermal imager using a automatic porch light and a frensel lense.

Footprints project overview

not to be picky or anything....

[carambola5]

but "motion" cannot be described in "microns." I think you mean "cheap displacement sensor".

And viscoelasticity is not necessarily a plastic-related thing. Some metals and composites may strain in a viscoelastic manner. Biological tissue is also generally deemed viscoelastic. Basically, it means: the amount of stress in the material is proportional to the rate at which it is displaced (or strained, in more correct terms).

Re:Can it be done for cell counting?

[Anonymous Coward]

60 microns is too low a resolution for that purpose.

Re:Subscription Only Science = evil

[norton_I]

Restricting knowledge only serves to retard growth, and keep the 'special ones' in power.

The results are public, just not the copyrighted article. Since tax dollars do not go to the journals, they charge for subscriptions -- print or electronic.

That said, most scientists I know are frustrated by this as well, and do what they can to allow freer access to their work. So, if you want access to almost any scientific article, try the following (in order):

1) Go to the author's web page. Most journals allow authors to put copies of their papers online, and many scientists take advantage of this.

2) Go to a nearby university library. If they don't subscribe to the journal in question, ask a librarian, it may be possible to get it from another university.

3) Go to arxiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov). Many articles are published there as preprints, but may or may not be the final published version.

4) Finally, email one of the authors. In all liklihood, they will be happy to send you a PDF of their article if it is not available via another mechanism.

The restrictions on the dissemination of scientific literature do not stop anyone with even a tiny bit of motivation. Also, a few journals require subscriptions, but allow google to index the full text, which means the whole article may be in google's cache.

This calls for Google Scholar

[DaoudaW]

Searching Google Scolar for "optical mouse motion sensor Ng" provides some useful information. The PDFs are slashdotted like others have mentioned, but the "View as Html" pages are the google cache. The graphs are worthless, but the text is all there.